And the Heroes We Used to Hail
After a rather dark and winding chapter, I’ve been having a bit of a personal renaissance lately. One of identity. One of knowing. One of being.
And while I’ll spare you the details of my particular situation, you might allow me to share some insights that could be of arguable significance in your life.
Growing Up
I think a rather unfortunate side-effect of our post-enlightenment upbringing is that we’ve nearly lost all appreciation for the imagination. In fact, the imagination is broadly considered to be something that you can and should grow out of as you mature.
And if we aren’t casting off the imagination as a derelict fragment of our youth, we’re leaving it to the poets and filmmakers as a frivolous mechanism by which we bring about something so “trivial” as the arts.
The imagination (and art for that matter), has lost all significance with the real world. The world of things, and rules, and science, and reason. But this is a rather vapid understanding of imagination, in ways that I’ll detail.
We almost always think of the imagination as an explicit departure from reality. But this might be better termed as “fantasy” for the purpose of our discussion today. Because there is another kind of imagination which actually involves coming to a deeper and richer understanding of reality, precisely by allowing us to depart from where we are.
And this is the power of perspective.
Perspective and Imagination
If you take individuals (even those with higher IQ), and give them statistical data demonstrating the importance of saving money for retirement, a very limited number of them will actually make any sort of change in their financial strategy.
But if you take these individuals through a visualization exercise where they are vividly imagining their older selves, and what life is like for that person…a greater number of these people will actually begin saving money for their future selves.
(These findings come from a 2011 Hershfield study, Increasing Saving Behavior Through Age-Progressed Renderings of the Future Self)
What can this tell us about the human condition? Well firstly that we aren’t nearly as rational as we think we are. But secondly, that the imagination can actually play a role in making things more real, rather than less so.
The imagination allows us to temporarily inhabit another perspective, and in doing so see the world from a different point of view. And many times a more advantageous point of view. It’s almost like the difference between someone telling you they heard a funny joke, and them actually telling you the joke. In the first case your information is second-hand. In the second case your experience is first-hand. That played out nicely.
We Used to Try
When we were younger—teenagers even—we all had these images of who we wanted to be. Not exactly idols per se. More like archetypal visions of the kind of character we wanted to be. Maybe we looked up to a protagonist in a movie we watched or a book we read. Maybe there was an upperclassman that we really admired.
But I want to stress that it was really more than wanting to dress a certain way, or talk a certain way, or listen to a particular kind of music, or hang out with a particular kind of friend…it was a whole person we wanted to be. And a person is always more than the sum of their parts.
We were constantly in the process of using our imagination to answer questions like,
- “How would a tough guy talk?”
- “How would a pretty girl walk?”
- “What kind of book would a smart person read?”
We were always in the process of becoming more like the character we wanted to be. And whether this was a “good” character or not is somewhat besides the point. Because at some point, most of us just stopped with all of this. At least in such a concious manner.
There was definitely a period of time where I wrote all of this off as shallow and vain.
- “You’re just trying to be X”
- “He’s just trying to be Y”.
These were my critiques of my peers. At times it felt like everyone was just posing to be something they weren’t. But I now look back at my younger self and laugh—because that was the entire point.
What’s so bad about trying to be something in the first place? Even a half decent picture of who you want to be gets you a whole lot further than having no vision at all. That’s for sure. Without a vision—without an aim—how are you to make sense of the world? You don’t. You can’t. You’re caught up in an endless storm of undifferentiated chaos. And with nowhere to go, you just get tossed by the wind.
And that’s no way to live life.
A Rediscovery
I’ve been rediscovering my imagination lately. I’ve been rediscovering the power in having an image of who I want to be, and the dire need for doing so.
Instead of just taking the world in from whatever perspective you happen to be occupying moment by moment, I want you to picture that character that calls to you. And ask yourself,
- How would they feel right now?
- What kinds of things would they be thinking about right now?
- How would they act in this situation?
Use your imagination. Dare to wonder what life might be like if you were someone new. Someone better. And most importantly, someone that you might actually want to be.
And you may just find that you really can start living in a different world than you’ve been living in lately.
That’s been my experience.
I’ll leave you with these words:
If imagination must be for children, then be a child again.
— David Kennedy